2025 Sir Edward 'Weary' Dunlop Dinner
Speech delivered by Peter Varghese at the Edward 'Weary' Dunlop Dinner
Date: 30 October 2025
Since its inception in 1990, Asialink has known that engagement with Asia was a matter of both the heart and the mind. Australia needed better to understand why the region mattered in terms of our hard interests. But we also needed as a community to engage with Asia; to grasp at a more fundamental level its diversity, its cultures and languages and its different histories.
This did not come naturally. Our historical gaze often by-passed Asia. And even when Asia moved from the periphery closer to the centre, our engagement came with a measure of unease, even anxiety. The mind and the heart were rarely in sync.
Since then we have made much progress but it has been uneven. Getting the balance right remains a formidable challenge, not least because the Asia engagement narrative itself needs to adapt to a very different world.
That Asia broadly defined will matter even more to Australia is one of the few certainties remaining in the bonfire of certainties which marks the world today. Every generation holds the conceit that they are poised on the edge of unprecedented change. Today that conceit looks commonplace.
Australia’s Asian journey is full of paradoxes. We are among the most Asian oriented economies in the world and yet the demand from business for Asia literacy is tepid. We have significant Asian diasporas but they have yet to find a niche in our foreign and trade policies. Our government footprint in the region is strong but our business profile low. Trade is high but investment low.
We talk of the Asian century but we do little to prepare for it. Here, as in many other parts of our public policy, the gap between what we say and what we do remains wide. But that may reflect a preference these days to say more rather than to do less.
None of these are fatal flaws. Many are no more than a recognition that walking the talk is rarely a smooth movement.
Normally we could take these inconsistencies in our stride. But these are not normal times and the biggest risk we face today is complacency: a sense that what has stood us in good stead up to now will continue to work well enough for what is around the corner.
That corner is however going to be tricky to navigate. The international order is at a hinge point. Gone or suspended are the structures of the last eighty years carefully crafted to give effect to principles of liberal democracy, market economies, respect for human rights and for the notion of sovereign equality.
It was never a perfect system. It had its contradictions and hypocrisies. The scaffolding of multilateralism could not hide the reality that power still drove international relations. But for Australia, which can neither buy nor bully its way in the world, the US led post war order was tailor made and it brought us a long period of relative peace and prosperity.
Even when the international system worked to our advantage, it did not make the region any less important to Australia. At its best they complemented each other.
Now, as the international order fades, the region becomes all the more important because it is largely here in the Indo Pacific that we will have to shape a new strategy to deal with what is increasingly looking like a slow unwinding of US global pre-eminence.
The US will remain powerful, indeed the most powerful single nation by a clear margin for the next few decades at least. But its view of its interests is shifting. It is becoming a more normal power in the way in which it defines its interests. Driven less by the idea of the city on the hill and more by narrow calculations on an abacus where everything appears zero sum. Even those who were never convinced about American exceptionalism must now regret the end of an era.
As the US takes a different turn, Asia becomes even more important to Australia. Not an exclusive relationship but an indispensable one. More and more Asia will provide the wellsprings of Australian security and prosperity.
That will require building genuinely multidimensional relationships in the region. Relationships grounded in trade, defence and security but also shaped by a more intimate knowledge of each other.
Australians need to feel at ease in the company of our Asian neighbours. To do that we must know more about them and them about us. Know more about their national stories, their languages and cultures, more about their hopes and fears, and more about what unites and divides them.
There was never a time when we could think of Asia as a single entity but too often we did indeed have a collective view of the region which did not take sufficient account of its diversity and divisions. It was broad brush rather than fine grained.
Explaining the region to Australia and Australia to the region has been at the heart of Asialink’s work. It is a mission which is getting more complex as both the region and Australia change. There are many things Australia needs to do for itself if we are to succeed. But ultimately our success will also depend on what we can do together in the region.
This is why Asia literacy matters and yet it is going backwards. As Australia recalibrates the mix of region, alliance and multilateralism which have been the three pillars of our foreign policy, the region will occupy an even larger space. That means that our Asia capability will become as important as longitude and latitude if we are successfully to navigate the brave new world ahead.